Luxion Releases KeyShot 9, Introduces GPU Rendering And Denoising Acceleration

There were many surprises to be had at SIGGRAPH this past summer, but few announcements grabbed us quite as much as Luxion’s tease that GPU acceleration would be coming to KeyShot before the end of the year. Well, that “before the end of the year” is right now, as Luxion has finally yanked the veil off of the much-anticipated KeyShot 9.

As we covered in the summer, KeyShot 9 is breaking tradition to introduce GPU acceleration, and while NVIDIA’s RTX is the major focus, rendering will also work no problem with any GPU Maxwell-based or later (eg: GTX 980+). If you have an RTX card, its ray tracing and deep-learning accelerators will be used for rendering and denoising, respectively.

In general, projects rendered to the GPU should look the same as those rendered to the CPU, but if there do happen to be some differences, they should be easily worked around (it’s ridiculously hard to reach 1:1 render output between CPU and GPU). For CPU-only users, the new denoising feature can still be used; it simply won’t be as quick as the GPU – unless you happen to have a high-end CPU but low-end GPU.

With denoising, you can render an image much quicker, but its quality may not match a regular final output. The scary speed of the denoiser (at least with fast GPU) allows for really quick updates, so that when you finally get things set up the way you want, you can then render your production image from there.

Performance upticks are great, but one feature that we can’t help but talk about with KeyShot’s Pro version is RealCloth (Nov 6 addendum: only the weave edit feature is exclusive to Pro; the HD version of KeyShot can still use RealCloth materials and adjust properties). This is a feature we’ve only heard about up to this point, so we haven’t been able to take it for a spin ourselves, but it’s a patent-pending solution that allows you to create realistic woven materials that can be adjusted many different ways in real-time.

You can see an example of RealCloth used with these pillows (although they are hard to appreciate without close-ups):

Another major perk with the new Pro version is the ability to export images using a web configurator, so that you can create a website that will allow users to check out different configurations for a single product based on the parameters that you set. The output won’t be fully 3D since stills are used, but it can come close if enough angles are outputted. For true 3D support of an exported project, KeyShot’s free Viewer application can be used.

To learn more about what’s new in KeyShot 9, you can head on over to the official product page. Pricing seems in tact to what it was before: $995 for the HD version, $1,995 for Pro, with higher tiers available for enterprise use.